Proving once again that Inio Asano is still adept at writing short, character-driven parables, over here he's basically written the updated version of Franz Kafka's the Metamorphosis for our Century.

The blogger Scott Alexander has wrote a lot about the sort of self-perpetuating kind of narrative that results from spinning up Social Justice issues, that may cause more harm than good. He also raised up the point that there appears to be a rising backlash to stuff like PC-culture, because people are simply getting tired from its reductions into binary human values.

Any tendency to build up a narrative of a person that is anything less than human, subject to all the human cruelties and foibles, is bound to be detrimental to any cause that claims to alleviate human suffering and discrimination. Because you can't weave a narrative of forgiveness if you don't take into account forgiveness of the perpetrators and understanding of their conditions, which are just as justifiable as the stand your yourself are taking.

I've known quite a few racists who acquire that disposition solely because of the background experiences they've had that predisposes them to apply the same calculus to everyone within the race (like extensive bullying or fighting etc...), and such kinds of experiences are the baseline by which everyone acts on. You attain the same kind of discriminations when, for example, you have friends that prefer Mecha over Moe Comedies and re-iterate the same tendencies over and over again. Though these analogues are vastly different, and spell vastly different outcomes for the initial selections, but the guiding principle is the same. It's conditioning based on the need for survival, social bonding, and natural selection.

The only way to get out of this is, rather than firing up emotions and weaving pity-narratives in hopes of counter-balancing the primal aggressiveness, is cold rational detachment and working purely on a statistical basis, or just plainly seeing what is actually there, yet no one can ever work on these principles perfectly. Telling stories of peace and love does little to detract from the fact that violence perpetrated by all races against one another exists in US prisons, for example, where the Aryan Brotherhood, Crips & Bloods, the Mexican Mafia, etc... are all in this one huge tussle where dog eats dog and no one comes out on top.

And, furthermore, Ted Chiang has this great short story called Liking What You See, which is about the effects of a society where the faculty to recognize Beauty has been scientifically castrated, and the various quandaries that results from this development. Even then his moral is that even the very act of being able to biologically remove these base discriminative tendencies will not solve the problem in any way. Natural Selection is a bitch like that. A million shots in the darkness with some entering on the upper tier of the spectrum and some having to subsist on the lower end of the spectrum.

We still try, but we fail, and yet its recognition of failure, and recognition of the ability in yourself that you may treat people as less than human, that results in the kind of real action being born out of pure empathy, rather than niggardly and scrivening racking up of 'pity-points' in an effort to quantify good, and labeling everything else as evil. Lynch-mobs, and shouting out detractors from a grandiose moralizing pedestal, won't do anymore. Civilization is born from the ability to separate ourselves from our base emotions, and, sadly, this also falls true for the base emotion of pity, which is itself tied to anger. Stefan Zweig has written an entire novel about this called Beware of Pity.

So this whole comic works simply on those terms. A statement through exaggeration of a scenario, but with strong psychological bases, about what occurs when you whitewash Human Nature and expect to obtain a perfect loving universe. It just doesn't work, and it has never worked.read more

I recognized so much of the modern society in this one-shot, the "strange person", who everyone thinks is strange but no one dares to say, because it would be not politically correct, so instead everyone pretends the strange person is special in order to not be labeled as an intolerant being.

I'm not a great admirer of Asano's work, but i must say this piece of work showed a lot of his improvement, the art it's simple but is somehow better than his other works, the storyline is satisfying (unlike some of his previous works), overall i must say no one who likes good manga would regret reading Bakemono Recchan.read more